Earlier this month, a columnist for the right-wing UK Telegraph penned an op-ed entitled “Gen Z are an employer’s nightmare – my twenties put them to shame.” On its face, the article itself is quite unremarkable: the usual mashup of post-pandemic employer grievances about indolent workers and paint-by-numbers complaints about Kids Today. There’s even a generic stock image of a reclining Gen Zer drinking out of a mason jar with a straw while talking on their cell phone to go with it.

Subtlety doesn’t tend to feature much in this genre of op-ed, but if I told you the author of the piece in question was the daughter of a baron educated at Eton College with the unimprovable name “Sophia Money-Coutts” you’d probably assume I was making a rather lazy and heavy-handed attempt at satire. If the name Coutts sounds familiar, that’s probably because it’s also the name of one of the world’s oldest and most successful banks. Ms Coutts’s father — whose full title is Crispin James Alan Nevill Money-Coutts, 9th Baron Latymer — is a descendent of its founder, Thomas Coutts, whose own father, John Coutts, held the title Lord Provost of Edinburgh in the 1740s and received an inheritance that would be worth roughly £5.5 million today if adjusted for inflation. Her grandfather on her mother’s side, William Francis Deedes, was a baron, Tory cabinet minister, and editor of none other than the Telegraph. Her alma mater Wycombe Abbey, a private boarding school for young women aged eleven to eighteen, currently costs £15,900 per term (or £47,700 a year).

In describing her own working life, the author doesn’t exactly strengthen her case either. Beginning with unspecified “stints on shop floors” (whatever it was she was doing, we can safely assume it didn’t involve scrubbing said floors) and a “spell in a Kennington estate agency,” Coutts says she next worked as an assistant on the Features desk at the Evening Standard.